August 15th, 2012

I’m not one who is often accused of, nor credited with, planning ahead. But in this case I’ll take it. About a year ago, while I was working on the cover of Everything Goes: In the Air, the 2nd Everything Goes book, I decided to document the process with a time-lapse recording. I set my camera up so that it hovered over the drawing table and had it record a frame every couple of seconds. What resulted was a two-minute rendition of the drawing of an illustration that actually took a few hours.
I’ve had this video sitting around for a year now, and while on vacation up in Maine over the last few weeks I was able to string it together to make a little promo video for the book.

The movie is made up of 1,882 images, each shot six seconds apart. The color images are illustrations from the book, and the music is by my alter-ego, Dance Robot Dance.

Time-lapse videos can be funny to watch. I have a few that I sometimes show at schools events and they always get a good laugh from the students. Inevitably there are some kids who “get it” and know that the video was sped up, and there are other kids who later on will ask me how I did that so fast.

Of course, the bigger news here is that the book will be out in a matter of a few weeks. September 11 September 18 is the release date and you can pre-order it now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Indie-bound.

It probably goes without saying that for the next few weeks I’ll be posting a lot about Everything Goes: In the Air including a process post about designing and illustrating the cover that won’t be so speedy.

July 12th, 2011

January 25th, 2010

A year or so ago I drew an illustration of cars and trucks and stuff on a spaghetti-tangle of highways. This was commissioned by the fantastic toy-maker/card-publisher/gift-creator Mudpuppy and their art director Cynthia Matthews. I’ve done a few projects in the past for them, including the Air Land Sea puzzle and the scribbling monster journal.

Here’s the puzzle itself.

This puzzle got delayed a bit in the production, but was finally released last week. It’s in a really nice little box and I’m very very pleased with the results. I got my small box of samples on Friday and immediately set to work putting the puzzle together. Furthermore, I recorded this process and made a movie which you can watch right here. Then, after you watch it, you can go to Mudpuppy’s website and order a dozen or two of them.